1. Field
The disclosure relates generally to an improved data processing system and more specifically to a computer implemented method, apparatus, and computer usable program code for automatically discovering solution procedures for customized problem resolution.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today, companies are increasingly moving their customer support services toward customer self-enablement. This customer self-enablement empowers the customers with on-line tools to reduce customer service center call volume and thus lower operating costs. In this self-enablement process, companies are opening up portions of their knowledge bases (i.e. databases containing well-structured text documents describing solution procedures and best practices to the most common problems or information technology (IT) issues experienced by customers), making these knowledge bases accessible to customers. In addition, such self-service solutions also provide access to software patches, updates, and other executables that aid customers in the problem resolution process.
At the same time, a proliferation of social technologies, such as social software, enable knowledge sharing by a community of customers and other users. Such collaborative support models are gaining favor with customers due to their potential to improve and speed-up problem resolution times, as well as faster access to different support solutions. Today, enormous amounts of data content, such as blogs, forums, online message boards, online guides, and Wikis, is becoming abundant and easily accessible on the Web due to the fast growing storage and processing capabilities of modern computers, which are ubiquitously connected. This heterogeneous Web content, if properly integrated, may provide a great source of information to provide solutions to many problems experienced by customers. Even though today's search engines are efficient in retrieving available online information, these search engines lack the ability to deduce and compose answers to queries by drawing on these bodies of information, which reside in various parts of knowledge bases and data sources.